Can Influencers Be The Missing Ingredient In Your Marketing Strategy?

The rise of marketing and e-commerce has been one of the most significant developments of the past decade. This has been driven by the growth of the internet, with more and more people relying on online trends and adverts for their purchasing needs. As a result, businesses invest in online marketing strategies such as social media management, email marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and many others to drive traffic and reach wider audiences. 

We know you’re working hard on establishing your brand. You’ve spent a lot of time pinning down your business goals and brainstorming ways to get ahead of your competitors. But if you’ve tried various marketing strategies and are still falling short of your expected outcomes, perhaps Influencer Marketing is the answer to boost your brand.

What is an Influencer?

An influencer is someone with an established online reputation because of their expertise on a specific topic or niche. 

Influencer Marketing Hub defined it as “someone who has the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience”.

This can range from artists (athletes, musicians, pop-culture celebrities, etc.) to bloggers and content creators, and industry leaders and experts (journalists, academics, professional advisors, etc.). 

More businesses are employing the power of influencers to further breach communication gaps between brands and their consumers. This strategy is dubbed ‘Influencer Marketing’ and is becoming an increasingly popular way to skyrocket brand reputation and sales.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing focuses on using key opinion leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead focus on targeting a smaller group of influential people. 

These influencers may have a large social media following or they may be well-connected in their industry. The goal is simple: to get these influencers to share your content, do a review on your product, or promote your services to their followers, which, in turn, will reach a larger audience.

How Can Influencers Benefit Your Business?

Influencers can be a valuable asset to your marketing ventures. Social media influencers, in particular, are creative, resourceful, and can deliver content to their audience in a way that would evoke action (or reaction). How else do you think they gain a large following? 

Apart from that, consumers often trust the opinion of influencers, thus the tendency to support what they advertise, listen to what they say,  and more likely engage with your brand.

What are the Different Types of Influencer Content Campaigns?

  1. Product Seeding 

Sending free products to influencers might get you positive mentions in their posts. And honestly, there’s nothing better than having a person with high-level influence vouch for the quality of your brand. This is one of the less absolute ways to get your name out there, though, since there is no official partnership, and it fully depends on the influencer whether or not they’d share your product.

  1. Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Businesses can give commissions for every sale generated from the influencer’s efforts to promote the product. Often this would involve discount promo codes for influencers to provide to their audience to prompt them to purchase on the brand’s online store. A win-win situation, where the influencer earns their share and your business gets its sale.

  1. Product Placements

Subtlety can be the best way to highlight something. Instagram influencers can seamlessly employ this technique by incorporating products into their content – in a manner that would appear natural and not overly emphasized or staged. In this case, the influencer is not trying to sell actively, but rather they are recommending by simply showing, mentioning, or bragging about it. 

  1. Brand ambassadorship

This is when a business hires a person of influence to be the ‘face’ of their brand. This can involve them in representing your brand in events, advertising your goods and services on their social media accounts and via other platforms, and answering questions consumers might have about the product (therefore, they should be knowledgeable about what the brand is about).

  1. Social Media Takeover

A takeover is when an influencer takes the reins to a brand’s social media page, allowing them to post what they want, when they want and however they want (with well-defined terms of the agreement, of course). Takeovers have been popular on Instagram and Snapchat, but businesses can implement them on other available social media platforms.

How do you choose the right ‘brand champions’?

More people are becoming influencers, all with distinct styles in sparking trends across the web. How do you find the perfect set of influencers to grow your brand?

  • Consider their audience size, and gauge whether it aligns with your target market. You’re aiming to reach the right people and expand your consumer base. Choosing an influencer who’s not relevant to your target demographic is unlikely to get you the results you want.
  • Observe the content they share and decide if they are a good fit for your products or services. Their content should align with your brand identity, vision, and values. Get a feel of their feeds, and see what kind of messages they’re sending to their audience. Do they spark meaningful conversation? Are they able to encourage viewers to act on something?
  • Consider their engagement levels and whether they are actively interacting with their followers. It will not hurt to check if an influencer’s audience reacts, responds, shares, or comments on their content. Apart from this, how frequently does the influencer interact with their following? 

By keeping these in mind, you can narrow your options and find the right influencer for your brand. 

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is something that every business should be looking into. With thorough research and testing, this marketing strategy can be the missing link to increasing the visibility of your brand. 

8 SEO Marketing Trends in 2020 That Entrepreneurs Should Know About

Every entrepreneur should already be familiar with the concept of SEO. Optimizing websites for search crawlers has become a crucial part of marketing for businesses both online and offline. It’s especially important if much of your business is done through online channels. Marketing trends are constantly evolving and it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to keep up with all the different SEO strategies being applied to modern business websites. To get a good idea of what you need to check out to prepare for next year, here are a couple of the most important trends coming up.

Quality over quantity

Ask any SEO expert and they’ll tell you that content is the single most important thing for your marketing strategy. When it comes to what that content should look like, opinions are divided. Some will advocate for spreading your content far and wide across many different websites and blogs. This strategy isn’t without its benefits. You’re able to reach a large number of websites and create a ton of useful links for your own.

On the other hand, this strategy also dilutes the quality of your content. Search engines are adapting to an increased amount of content and they’re curating it by quality. You need to show users that your content is top tier so that they’ll keep coming back to it. Search engines will recognize this and rank your page higher.

Website speed and UX

User experience is one of the most important metrics for SEO. It has a direct impact on the traffic of your website and how users perceive it. It’s also something that search engines account for when scouring websites.

Website speed is a big part of UX optimization and it’s something that every website should focus on improving. Google’s crawlers value website speed highly, which is why so many pages are optimizing for fast loading times this year.

Voice searches

While once a pretty niche part of SEO, voice searches have become an integral part of any SEO strategy. With the rise of smartphones, voice searches have stopped being considered a novelty. Now they’re considered just as important as any other form of search.

Optimizing for voice searches is a little bit harder than regular keywords. Searches aren’t treated the same way by search engines. They don’t lead to search pages, but rather the search engine prioritizes the top answer and displays it immediately.

Keywords tend to be shorter and more colloquial, to better match the way people talk, as it’s pretty different compared to the way they type into their phones.

Structured data

Data takes many forms on your website. When search engine crawlers scour your website for relevant information, they take every little bit of readable data into consideration.

To make it easier for search engine crawlers, your website features structured data in various different forms. Information that’s located alongside the metadata is a good example. It’s there to make crawling quicker and more efficient. Including more of it in your metadata and meta descriptions is a good way to get more attention from search crawlers.

Video content

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular form of content. Unlike written content and sponsored blog posts, users are much more likely to sit through an entire video and watch it all the way to the end. This gives digital marketers more opportunities to make use of clever strategies and product mentions.

Search engines are being adapted to work on finding videos through metadata and meta descriptions. They are quickly placing more value on high-traffic videos and properly optimized websites that can host them. You should strive to increase the number of videos you utilize in your marketing strategy and work on making your website more attractive for crawlers in this area.

Content length

While it’s true that content quality is more important than quantity, the individual length of a piece of marketing content is crucial as well. You can look at the length of a blog post and see it as a kind of quality. People want to be invested in the content that they’re consuming.

Longer pieces of quality content get far more views than their shorter counterparts. However, the difficulty comes from creating adequate content which will stimulate users long enough and keep them occupied and engaged. This is not easily accomplished by the average website owner. Instead, they often employ writing experts from digital marketing strategists like GWM to achieve better rankings. Creating ideal content that attracts search crawlers requires quite a bit of experience and knowledge.

Search engine snippets

Getting to the top of the search pages is a priority for websites. But what if you could get your page featured above the first result? This is Google’s “featured snippet” in a nutshell. It lets websites with exact answers get to the very top of search results.

Optimizing for featured snippets is going to be a crucial part of digital marketing strategies going forward. Have your content provide concise and direct answers to user’s queries and you’ll find that your pages will be getting a lot more traffic.

Influencers

The impact of influencer marketing is an often-underestimated part of digital marketing. Influencers have an enormous amount of power when it comes to brand creation. They’re able to exert their influence over countless fans of your brand and encourage their viewers to try out new products and services.

By reaching out to influencers and having them link to your website and its products, you can very quickly reach a much wider audience and signal that your brand is even more attractive to consumers.

Conclusion

If the past couple of years are any indicator of things to come, digital marketing is going to continue to flourish more than ever before. SEO strategies are constantly evolving to meet this expansive demand as businesses scramble to get their websites to the top of search results. Because of this, it’s important that you and your businesses remain on top of the latest and most effective tactics that will help your website stay relevant.